Alfred nobel a man of contrasts

---

ALFRED NOBEL – A MAN OF CONTRASTS 
 
Alfred Nobel, the great Swedish inventor and industrialist, was a man of many 
contrasts. He was the son of a bankrupt, but became a millionaire; a scientist with 
a love of literature, an industrialist who managed to remain an idealist. He made a 
fortune but lived a simple life, and although cheerful in company he was often sad 
in private. A lover of mankind, he never had a wife or family to love him. A 
patriotic son of his native land, he died alone on foreign soil.
He invented a new explosive, dynamite, to improve the peacetime industries of 
mining and road building, but saw it used as a weapon of war to kill and injure his 
fellow men. During his useful life he often felt he was useless: «Alfred Nobel», he 
once wrote of himself, «ought to have been put to death by a kind doctor as soon 
as, with a cry, he entered life». World-famous for his works he was never 
personally well known, for throughout his life he avoided publicity. «I do not see» 
he once said, «that I have deserved any fаme and I have no taste for it», but since 
his death, his name has brought fame and glory to others. 
He was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833 but moved to Russia with his 
parents in 1842, where his father, Immanuel, made a strong position for himself in 
the engineering industry. Immanuel Nobel invented the landmine and made a lot 
of money from government orders for it during the Crimean War, but went 
bankrupt soon after. Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred 
rejoined them in 1863, beginning his own study of explosives in his father’s 
laboratory. He had never been to school or university but had studied privately 
and by the time he was twenty was a skilful chemist and excellent linguist, 
speaking Swedish, Russian, German, French and English.
Like his father, Alfred Nobel was imaginative and inventive but he had better 
luck in business and showed more financial sense. He was quick to see industrial 
openings for his scientific inventions and built up over 80 companies in 20 
different countries. Indeed his greatness lays in his outstanding ability to combine 
the qualities of an original scientist with those of a forward-looking industrialist. 
But Nobel's main concern was never with making money or even with making 
scientific discoveries.
Seldom happy he was always searching for a meaning of life and from his 
youth had taken a serious interest in literature and philosophy. Perhaps because he 
could not find ordinary human love — he never married — he came to care 
deeply about the whole of mankind. He was always generous to the poor: «I'd 
rather take care of
 
the stomachs of the living than the glory of the dead in the form 
of stone memorials», he once said. His greatest wish, however, was to see an end 
to wars and thus peace between nations, and he spent much time and money 
working for this cause until his death, in Italy in 1896. His famous will in
 
which 
he left money to provide prizes for outstanding works in Physics, Chemistry, 
Physiology, Medicine, Literature and Peace is a memorial to his interests and 
ideals. And so, the man who felt he should have died at birth is remembered and 
respected long after his death. 

---